Elsien's Traveblogue

Paris, Tuesday 9th November 2010
I almost feel like a real researcher and academic now! I have just spent several hours in that enormous Fort-Knoxian hypermodern temple to François Mitterand and French academic learning, the Bibliothèque Nationale François Mitterand and this time, unlike last week, I managed to perpetrate into the bowels of the building. I had to get a researchers' card to get books out of storage for which you have to have a little interview before they print you a photo ID. They had to make sure I really needed the books there, she said. Well, have you ever even heard of Hubert Robert? How many biographies and exhibitions of the man's work have you seen? How many articles on him does JSTOR come up with? When I told her I lived in England, I didn't have to say any more, got the all-understanding Gallic shrug : “Ah, well, Madame, in that case ...
So, I got my little card which helped me to penetrate all those high, grey steel doors by pressing it to an electronic reader at each entry point. The down escalators were the longest I have seen, even on the Paris Metro, where there are a few really long ones and looking up into the towers above me was a scary experience. Anyway, I got there in the end, a half submerged floor, huge reading rooms arranged in a square beneath those four towering corner buildings, half a mile's walk to each end, but large picture windows looking out on a vast patio garden. I almost wrote 'opening out' but no, of course they don't open, silly!
I found two more essential books from my list on the shelves there and made copious notes on my postage stamp computer, which I was allowed to bring in in a special plastic see-through briefcase, having had to hand in my black un-transparent one. I also worked out how to get books out of storage: all done by computer, but then you do have to wait an hour before they get them to your allocated seat. You can reserve your seat and the books and articles you want the day before on Internet though ... Will try that next time.
The picture I include today, by the way, is one of Hubert Robert's paintings I want to look at in my dissertation called The Distribution of the Milk in the St Lazare prison, where he was held during the Terror, but where he, even so, managed to do some 50 paintings, some on his dinner plates (!) and lots of drawings. My theme so far is: Are Revolution and Art incompatible?
With all that, I lived like a mole today, either underground researching, or travelling or, at best, in my Pigalle cafe dealing with my 54 emails as the hotel's WiFi isn't working.... Back to Brussels to J. and telephone testing on Wednesday but a day off on Thursday as it's a Belgian National Holiday!